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 Tapping Twitter: Invoke founder Ryan Holmes excels at uncovering business opportunities in social media
By Curt Cherewayko Things went full circle for Ryan Holmes last January when Invoke Media spun out its popular Twitter client HootSuite. Holmes, Invoke’s founder, handed over his duties at Invoke to his partners in order to focus entirely on developing HootSuite Media Inc. – he was running a small Internet startup again. The success of Invoke and other ventures on Holmes’ entrepreneurial scoresheet suggests that HootSuite will be another innovative online revenue generator to emerge from the funky work-play space in Gastown that Holmes and the Invoke-HootSuite team call headquarters. Not that taking HootSuite commercial will be easy: the Twitter application is at a tricky inflection point where it has built up a large audience but doesn’t know how its audience will react to having to pay for some services. The company is attaching a “freemium” model to the service in July, which means that users will be still be able to use HootSuite freely but will have to pay for additional bronze, silver and gold standard services offered within it. “HootSuite has big potential in terms of the amount of traffic it’s pushing,” said Holmes from an Invoke boardroom down the hall from the head office he shares with his dog. He explained that HootSuite, which manages one million social media accounts for about 400,000 unique users, will try to monetize the 3% to 5% of accounts that are most active. Those accounts are generally owned by large brands from the media and retail space including Conde Nast, AOL, Banana Republic and Dell. They use HootSuite to dig up analytics about, and to monitor and add to, the larger conversation in the social networking spheres of Twitter and, more recently, Facebook and LinkedIn. “Those people are thoroughly entrenched,” said Holmes. “The free users will either always stay free or they’ll at some point find some features that are worthwhile for them to upgrade to.” As a self-taught web programmer with an unfinished commerce degree, Holmes is not the most computer literate member of the Invoke team. Rather, he is the entrepreneurial hand that has guided Invoke since its founding in 2000 as a basic web development services firm and through its evolution into a digital marketing agency with a score of unique assets that have powered some of the Internet’s most innovative marketing campaigns. Although he doesn’t disclose figures, Holmes said Invoke has been profitable since day one. Holmes found his entrepreneurial legs early in life as the owner of a paintball company during high school in early 1990s Vernon. His brother eventually took over as operating partner but Holmes continued on as a director and had a hand in developing the company’s www.paintballgear.ca website, which has grown into one of the largest online retail sites in Canada for paintball equipment. He did two years of the business program at Okanagan College before entering the commerce program at the University of Victoria in 1997. His academic career was short-lived. “I wasn’t really feeling it,” said Holmes. Returning to hometown Vernon, Holmes opened a pizza chain known as Growlie’s. He considered franchising the small but successful brand, but fortuitously saw more opportunity in the Internet than in pizza-by-the-slice. He sold Growlie’s in 1999, moved to Vancouver and began doing web development at Otherways Media. Undeterred by the fact that Otherways became a dot-com casualty shortly after he joined, Holmes founded Invoke. “I was passionate about the web and I knew it wasn’t just a flash in the pan,” he said. Through his work at Otherways and through development of Invoke’s early e-commerce platform, content-management platform and client websites, Holmes cut his programming and marketing teeth. In 2006, after a key member of Invoke’s four-employee team left the company, Holmes partnered with Dario Meli and David Tedman, who were running Novare Res, another boutique agency in Vancouver. Meli and Tedman are headquartered in New York, where they are Invoke’s operations and business development leaders and its eyes on its key U.S. market. It was around the time that Invoke and Novare Res merged that Invoke began developing the products it’s known for today. Five years ago, it launched its online video-contest platform, Memelabs, after a client requested Invoke create a viral video. “We said, ‘Making you a viral video is a crap shoot,’” said Holmes, referring to the fact that whoever is able to create the exact formula for making a video go viral would likely be the world’s most coveted marketer. Instead, the company created a video contest on which the online community could post its own video creations. Brands like Wells Fargo, Transworld Skateboarding and Jim Beam have used Memelabs to create online video contests in which both the production (the contest) and the result (the winning video) become a packaged marketing campaign. Invoke has also developed an early version of VidRollr, which is an ad platform that is embedded into websites to allow visitors to join in threads of video conversations. And its latest product, Hitt.it, is a white-label product used by companies to create location-based social networking sites. Despite its pre-commercial status, HootSuite is Invoke’s most identifiable product. More than half of Invoke’s 32 employees are dedicated to developing the application, which was spun out after Blumberg Capital and Hearst Interactive Media led a $2 million financing for it. Holmes has largely been on the road in recent months, speaking at social networking conferences while simultaneously building up the HootSuite brand before its commercial launch in July. Given that Twitter has yet to develop its own proven revenue-generation model, HootSuite’s commercial launch is significant. Holmes’ confidence in the Twitter team reflects the confidence he has in the HootSuite team and its ability to monetize the Twittersphere – even if it takes some additional time and product-tweaking. “Twitter has some amazing minds at it [and] they have a huge war chest of money,” said Holmes. “The eyeballs are there right now, so marketers and advertisers want to be there.” •
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Mission: Monetize Invoke’s popular Twitter client HootSuite Asset: Experience in building businesses in a diverse range of industries Yield: One of Vancouver’s leading digital marketing agencies and a cache of unique Internet assets
This article from Business in Vancouver June 8-14, 2010; issue 1076 Photograph: Dominic Schaefer
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